History

By Gillian Widdicombe Isaacs, 4th November 2011

Hadleigh Hall School started, with just 18 pupils, in September 1949.  The Hall, and the adjoining Brett Works factory site, had been bought as bankrupt stock by George Price in 1929.  The school’s first years were intimately associated with his family.

George Price was a natural entrepreneur: the elder son of an Enfield carpet and textile trader, he developed the Hadleigh branch of E H Price into a successful small business making rugs and carpets. Wool was dyed in big vats on the premises, and it was said that you could tell which patterns had been ordered by the colour of the River Brett, which flowed, or eddied, alongside the factory site.  


George had served as an officer in Palestine during World War 1, an experience he never talked about but put to good use in World War 2, when his Hadleigh factory quickly diversified into parachutes, kit bags, or whatever the War Office needed and the girls of Hadleigh could stitch together. 


The Brett Works became an important source of employment and George Price a pillar of the Hadleigh community –  he was a notable Freemason, Chairman of Hadleigh Football Club, Conservative Councillor etc.  He travelled to London once a week, a First Class carriage added to the branch line especially for his use. He smoked a ferocious pipe, loved polo and golf, and ate well – probably too well as his death certificate suggests. He said little, hummed a lot, jangled the coins in the pockets of his tweed suits, went to the Highlands of Scotland every August, and was known in the Widdicombe family as "Bonk", the first word his grandson Raymond said in his presence.

George Price

George Price


His wife, Ruth Baxendale, was less conventional. The daughter of a Presbyterian Minister in Middlesex, Ruth had strong views, which unfortunately she turned to action by throwing a brick at the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Prices developed the garden at Hadleigh Hall  – Ruth was a keen gardener, and personally tended the herbaceous borders, and a large fruit and vegetable area.  They also built a tennis court, and a small boathouse beside the Brett. 

Hadleigh Hall in 1929

Summer Boating on the River Brett (1930s)

Ruth Price c1929

Ruth Price (circa 1929)


 Tennis, boating, Morris dancing, amateur music and drama were happy pastimes in Hadleigh for the two Price daughters, Ione and Eileen.  In 1937, both girls married and left Hadleigh Hall.  


Eileen married Leslie Widdicombe, a tall, dark, handsome Cambridge graduate, whom George Price had taken on as a salesman; and Ione suddenly married Leslie’s adventurous younger brother, George Widdicombe.  George Price treated the two Widdicombes as if they were his sons: George and Ione moved to a historic house in Lavenham; Leslie and Eileen to a farm at Aldham, a shrewd move as war loomed, for there were rabbits, chickens, milk, cheese and butter on hand. Hadleigh hit the national headlines during the War, when Leslie became the billeting officer for Hadleigh and the Brett Works canteen was used as the billet centre for evacuees from the East End of London.

But 1945 began badly. Ione's husband, George, had been inspired by the Bomber Command officers drinking in the Swan at Lavenham to sign up as a pilot in the RAF. On his final training mission, January 4th, just as the war was ending in 1945, his plane was sent out in bad weather and lost over the North Sea in a gale. In 1949, Ruth Price put the Sunday roast in the oven at Hadleigh Hall, went off to Chapel, where she died of a stroke.

Leslie Widdicombe as Billeting Officer


Hadleigh Hall was too big for George Price to live in alone. He spent the rest of his life with his widowed daughter, Ione, first at Bradfield House Hotel, near Manningtree, which she had intended to run with her husband; then at Hillmorton House in Lavenham. 

So what was to be done with Hadleigh Hall?  The idea of a school was an obvious solution, because Leslie Widdicombe’s daughter, Gillian, had left nursery school in Hadleigh to go to the junior school at Ipswich High. But getting there was a problem; it was 10 miles to Ipswich from the Aldham farm, so the journey to Ipswich was often made by a lorry driven by "Snowy" White, one of the farm labourers.


Leslie Widdicombe was well placed to run a school. Before selling carpets, he had been a teacher himself; and his father had been the distinguished Senior Tutor and Bursar at Downing College, Cambridge.  So George Price and Leslie Widdicombe began Hadleigh Hall School to serve the evident needs of local professional people.  The old stables were converted into classrooms; suitable toilets were built, desks and chairs arrived. Each child had to bring a shoe-bag, to hang in the corridor beside the telephone.  The uniform for girls was grey flannel pinafore dress in winter, blue and white striped or checked cotton frocks in summer, the fabric to be bought from Corders. The first pupils included Harriet and Charlotte Llewellyn Jones, daughters of a neighbouring farmer in Aldham; Louise and Helen Barnes, the daughters of Hadleigh’s popular doctor.  Maggi Hambling's father worked in Barclays Bank and was a close friend of the Widdicombe family; Sarah Gotelee was the Hadleigh solicitor's daughter. More girls than boys at first, though a redhaired lad called James was memorable, not least for pulling down someone's knickers.


A major factor in the success of the school was the appointment of Iola Barlow as Headmistress. A Froebel-trained spinster, Iola and her father, a retired rector from East Bergholt, moved into the top floor of the Hall, and quickly gained the respect of local families. Hadleigh Hall School grew rapidly.  But the Price family suffered another loss when Eileen Widdicombe died of breast cancer, in May 1951, aged 38, leaving a son, Raymond, at prep school in Felixstowe, and Gillian, aged 7, at Hadleigh Hall.         

Eileen


Eileen's terminal illness was long and painful: Gillian was often farmed out for "sleepovers" with kindly parents of other children at HHS; more often, she stayed with Iola at the school, sleeping in what had been Eileen’s own bedroom.  The morning after Eileen's long-expected death, Gillian's class was learning multiplication tables: she still has a block about what happens after 7 x 5, the point at which she left the classroom to be told by her weeping father that her mother had died. An hour or so later, during break, Gillian sat on the grass with the others, making daisy chains as usual in May, then playing rounders on the front lawn. Hadleigh Hall was not just a very good school, it was a haven where grief could be set aside.

Gillian in School Overcoat (1952)


One of the first year's most memorable arrivals was a gym set, purchased by George Price and installed in the old ballroom. The first users felt small beside the leather clad vaulting towers, but the gym looked great in the prospectus. Some of the school’s early habits seem odd today. After lunch, the children lay down on matresses for half an hour, while a mistress, often Elizabeth Mann, read to them. The artist Maggi Hambling, one of the first 18, remembers these readings well; the Oscar Wilde stories read to her at HHS started a lifelong interest in Wilde, which eventually resulted in her commission for the first sculpture in Wilde’s honour to be erected in London, opposite the Charing Cross Hotel.      


The former ballroom was ideal for various parties and gatherings. Postman's Knock, Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs were obvious favourites, Ruth Price having left a piano in the corner. Naturally the Hadleigh branch of the Brownies met here, Brown Owl's symbolic toadstool discreetly appearing from the cupboard.  Knots were learned, and god knows whats: Gillian passed her cookery test with a baked potato stuffed with beetroot. Weaving baskets was popular with the girls, at least one of the early baskets still intact today.        


Maggi Hambling remembers the annual Nativity play as a highlight; was she Joseph, the Angel Gabriel, or Mary? It depends which interview you read with Maggi, her forceful personality clear at an early age. Sports day at the end of the summer term was a treat, with the egg and spoon and the sack race a welcome change from the usual handstands and leapfrog on the lawn.


After George Price died, in March 1964, things became difficult for Leslie Widdicombe.  The carpet business had gone through the floor, due to the impact of new technology and synthetic materials: even Cyril Lord, the market leader, went bankrupt, and E H Price (Hadleigh) duly followed suit. A bank guarantee, for new wide looms, led to the Widdicombe family losing the freehold of the Brett Works, taken over by George Price’s half-brother Harry, and eventually inherited by Harry's family in Sussex, most of whom never visited the increasingly dilapidated site. Leslie Widdicombe remarried, in 1952, Faith Coade, the elder daughter of the legendary headmaster of Bryanston School. In an unused shed at the Brett Works, Leslie started Seahorse Sails, which made terylene racing sails for Britain's Olympic yachtsmen and the America Cup winner Ted Turner, of CNN. But after Faith's first son, Nicholas, developed cerebral palsy, Leslie devoted much of his life to mental health care, and played a leading role in setting up Mencap's branch in Sudbury. It was a tribute to his many good works that, towards the end of his time as a Suffolk County Councillor, he was unopposed as a Labour member.   


The School flourished in the 1960s, many families sending all their children there in succession; but Miss Barlow retired, and state education improved. Leslie's youngest son Adrian, spent three years at HHS, under the new headmaster, Percy Aston. But after Adrian left, in 1967, Leslie Widdicombe ended his relationship with the school, which was sold to the incumbent headmaster and closed, insolvent, in 1973.

Hadleigh has changed dramatically in the last half century, now a prosperous, picturesque market town, the Brett Works site a controversial and still unresolved battle-ground for potential supermarket development. Hadleigh Hall has lost much of its garden, and is no longer a well-cared-for single residence or school.  But the Govenment has realised that in some circumstances, parents should be able to set up schools where nothing appropriate to local families exists; and Hadleigh Hall deserves to be celebrated as an excellent example of precisely that, fondly remembered by many of those who benefitted from it half a century ago.